Conducted by

News, News, and more Interesting Fish News

You may have noticed that the Fish-Watch
Project have been quite quiet over the last few months. This is because the
Coelacanth Programme has been taking the lion's share of our time, planning the
expedition and future of the Programme, motivating for funding, and recently,
actually going on the expedition. It has kept us (Phil Heemstra and James
Stapley, as well as many other staff members at SAIAB) more or less continuously
occupied since September last year.

Our hard work paid off when we went along on the coelacanth expedition (25
March - 29 April) on the FRS Algoa. Phil got one dive in Jago, the
submersible we were using, and is pretty certain he spotted a new species of Plectranthias, a small serannid fish. He also spotted a guitarfish
(Rhinobatos annulatus, Natal colour morph) at several hundred meters -
they were only really know from the surf zone previously, where they are most
frequently encountered.
I (James Stapley) have been quite busy updating and creating the coelacanth
programme's own website. You
might like to go there to learn more about what we have been doing. This was a
very interesting experience over the relatively low bandwidth link I had over a
cellphone - which also tended to get cut off in the middle of an upload while
the ship turned!
When we get a gap in our busy schedule, we will post some articles on the
site for you to read - we are off to Natal again next week, and would love to
join you at Aliwal Shoal 18/19 and 25/26 May for some Fish-Watch dives. Contact
Mark Addison at Blue Wilderness ((039) 973 2348), or Underwater World in Durban
((031) 332 5820) for the Sunday dives.

We trust by now you have recieved your Rockcod Worksheet, number 7 in our
series.

Divers and underwater photographers who keep
an eye out for those photogenic commensal shimp-gobies and their partners will
probably be aware of the whitecap shrimp-goby, Lotilia graciliosa. This
is one of the most elegant small fishes, being a distinctive velvety dark brown
in colour, with a broad white stripe from its snout tip to the beginning of the
first dorsal fin, which has a large round black spot edged with orange. The
whitecap shrimp-goby is known from the Red Sea and across to Southeast Asia,
Japan and northern Australia, but so far, this species has not been found south
of the Red Sea. The species has been reported by divers at Sodwana Bay; however,
it seems that what the divers at Sodwana saw, was actually the chocolate
shrimp-goby, Cryptocentrus malindiensis Smith, 1959.

This is a rare goby, originally described by
J.L.B. Smith from Malindi, Kenya; and apart from the original site, it is only
known from Aldabra Atoll, Mauritius and the Seychelles. And only Smith’s
original specimen is known in museum collections. The chocolate shrimp-goby
looks very like Lotilia, being dark chocolate brown, with a broad creamy
white band from its chin over the top of the head to end at the gap between the
two dorsal fins. Its first dorsal fin is quite low and does not have the
spectacular ocellate spot of the whitecap shrimp-goby. However, it is similar
enough to trick a (nameless) scientist into misidentifying a photograph of
it!

So, keep your eyes and cameras ready for the
chocolate goby hunt. It would be very interesting to discover if the whitecap
shrimp-goby’s distribution extends down the African coast outside the Red Sea,
and just as exciting to learn more about the chocolate shrimp-goby, such as its
preferred habitat and depth.

The shape of the head is also quite
distinctive - L. graciliosa has a pointed head, while C.
malindiensis has a much blunter snout which you can easily see in the
pictures. This, together with the length of the stripe on the head should make
it easy to tell the two species apart, even if all that you see is the head
sticking out of the burrow. (Ed.).

This fish is the pelagic
juvenile stage of the yellow-spotted burrfish Cyclichthys spilostylus; we
had only read about this unusual form in books and never previously seen a
specimen, until one was brought to us yesterday by Mr. Horace Pittaway, a local
fisherman who found it struggling in a rockpool. The projections you see coming
off the body are soft, fleshy tentacles. As the fish grows, it loses the
tentacles and they are replaced by the hard spines more typical of this family.
You can see the small spines developing at the base of the tentacles above the
eye. We suppose that the tentacles are used as a sort of camouflage amongst
floating seaweeds (Sargassum) where they are thought to spend the
juvenile stage of their life. The adult is benthic (lives on the bottom) and
attains a size of 28cm. It is widespread from South Africa to the South China
Sea, Philippines and Australia.

These are really
important photos. We have never seen this fish underwater before.
There are only two specimens in our fish collection, and these were collected by
a trawler in 110 m off southern Madagascar. These photos document the
first record of this species from southern Africa and on a coral reef. The
species is also known from Oman, India, Japan, Vietnam, and Australia, but all
of these records are based on trawl-caught fish taken in 50-200
m.

Fred Richardson of Rover
Media Productions, who have produced the "Scuba Sodwana" CD tells
us:

"The Velifer hypselopterus photos were taken a little East of 4-Buoy on
2-Mile reef in about 18m, 16 April 2000. The photographer is Mark van Coller
who took most of our pics. That is also the only time anyone on our team saw
them and I would guess that Mark and I put in at least 40 more dives on 4-Bouy
subsequent to these pics (although most of these dives where inshore of
4-bouy)."

31/12/2000Latimeria chalumnae - The
coelacanth

As you will no doubt
have seen in the press, a population of coelacanths has been found off Sodwana
Bay in northern Kwa-Zulu Natal. To read an article published in the South
African Journal of Science, and see pictures of the fish, please click here.

The colourful
scarlet-spotted blenny, Cirripectes stigmaticus, was described from the
Marshall Islands in the Pacific in 1953 by Strasburg & Schultz. In
1959, JLB Smith described Cirripectus [sic] cruentatus as a new
species, based on one specimen from Pinda Mozambique because it"differs from
other species in markings". It is often risky to describe a new species
based on a single specimen, because we cannot know the variation in colour and
other characters of some species without a sample that includes adults and
juveniles, males and females. It so happensthat the colour pattern of the
scarlet-spotted blenny varies quite a lot: some fish are mostly covered
with scarlet spots, and others have just a few. Females have a rust
coloured reticulation enclosing pale olive spots, and the males have scarlet
spots and lines on the rear part of the body. When Jeff Williams revised
the blenny genus Cirripectes in 1988, he determined that Smith's
species (C. cruentatus) is the same species as C.
stigmaticus. So the species' distribution was extended from the
central Pacific to Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Comores, Madagascar, Maldives,
Mauritius, St Brandons Shoals, and Sri Lanka.

As a result of Dennis
King's excellent photo of a specimen at Sodwana, we can now add
SouthAfrica to the range of this lovely blenny.